Story:

'The Remaining' is about a group of people who are lone survives. The cause of the disappearance of the others is unknown. 'The Remaining' people just get up one morning and find the whole city for themselves. With no communication with anyone outside the city, 'The Remaining' assume that they are the only ones left of mankind.

A few of them like the fact that they have the whole world to themselves and the others try to escape the known fact among them, that they are the last of mankind.

The Remaining

Storyboard to Final

Reference Image:

Coming up with a concept after seeing the 'Neon - Unity environment demo using only Asset Store models' video was tough. The bar was set really high. There were a bunch of other concepts I experimented with such as something along the lines of 'Anthem Trailer - Bioshock', 'Uncharted: The Lost Legacy' and some random art concept on the internet.

I ended up with this Story-line and concept mainly because of the limitations of the hardware I have access to. Although these efforts didn't make the final concept. It allowed me to come up with a workable concept by defining a line between what is currently achievable and what cannot be achieved by me given the time and the hardware I currently have.

Building on the Concept Art and Story

Now I have the story in place and the only thing left is, How I’m going to represent the story? What is the environment going to be like?

The mood I chose was ‘Dark and Rainy Environment’. The choice was made based on the story i.e people have different views about it. Some find it Romantic, Fun and want to sing and dance. While others like a bright sunny day. This mood really adds a dramatic effect and portrays the emotions of the characters in the story.

Materials

Since the scene was as dark and rainy, I chose to use shades of Gray and black with and varied metallic and smoothness levels as the base color.

The above images display the various Emission Materials used.

Textures

The Red arrows in the image point out the places where textures are used. These textures are converted into emission materials and placed in their respective locations. The below Images display how this was achieved.

The below image show Before and After images edited using Photoshop for the Retro Effect.

Lighting And Cameras

The whole scene was lit using the combination of Ambient Lighting and Emission Materials mostly. I added a spotlight on top of the camera facing in the direction of the camera to add a bit of visibility when the camera is pointing at something. Along with this point, lights and spotlights were placed strategically near the characters to add more quality to the shot something along the lines of what photographers do to enhance the mood of the characters.

The whole video was shot using different Cinemachine Virtual Cameras. Cinemachine is a really powerful tool. Together with Timeline, it allowed me to skip camera animation which gave me really smooth animation transactions between cameras. Which alone is a pretty complicated task. Doing the manually could have resulted in skippy animations which looks like fps drops.

Animation

The only animation apart from Cinemachine and Timeline Blend was Character animation. I used Mixamo.com for character animation also most of the characters were from Mixamo.com.

Post-Processing

Since the Lighting was only Emission Materials and Ambient light. I used Bloom and Screen Spacing Reflections to lighten up the scene. Also, the Emission Materials had emission values set between 1 to 3. This allowed the glow effect.

Because the Emission values were so high, I used Auto Exposure to flatten the colors and extra brightness. Also, it really hurts the viewer's eyes when the camera is too close to an emission material because of the brightness. Auto Exposure solved that issue like a charm.

Most of my scene composed of warm colors like Red, Yellow, Orange. In order to flatten them out and create the cyberpunk-ish look, I used Color grading.

Final Effects which helps to get the effect that you are viewing through a lens.